SysInternals

Scott Hanselman (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/) recently got with Carl Franklin (http://www.intellectualhedonism.com/) on Dot Net Rocks Episode 35 (http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=35) for an hour long presentation on the great tools from SysInternals (http://www.sysinternals.com/).

SysInternals is a collection of freeware tools that allows you to extract some really great info from the Windows OS, or adds some nifty extra utilities. If you don’t have an hour to invest right now, or are bandwidth impaired, I thought it’d be useful to spend a few blog posts talking about these tools.

One great feature of all the SysInternals tools is that none of them require installation. They can all be run without leaving footprints on the host system. I keep them on my USB thumb drive, so I can quickly and easily diagnose issues on users PCs.

A quick note, the parent company of SysInternals is WinTernals. WinTernals was recently purchased by Microsoft (shows you how cool the tools were). Soon many of the WinTernals / SysInternals tools will have Microsoft labels on them. Microsoft has pledged that SysInternals tools will continue to be free. Check the SysInternals blog for updates on the tools as time goes by.

To start things off, we’ll talk about a tool that helps you with your computer’s start up. Autoruns lets you examine everything that your computer launches. You can look at everything at once, or handy tabs let you look at it by category.

Clicking on an item will populate the window with info about that item:

Want to learn more about an item? Right click on it, and select Google from the menu. Autoruns will launch a Google search in your browser of choice on the program in question, letting you learn more about it, to determine if you actually need this piece of software to load in your system.

If you decide you don’t want it, simply uncheck the box. Next time you boot that particular software won’t load. Discover you need it? No problem, simply launch Autoruns again and check it on, reboot and all is well. Autoruns preserves all of the settings you had on the auto launch so it can easily be restored.

If you happen to have the SysInternals Process Explorer tool (I’ll blog about this shortly) you can actually see how much memory, etc. the particular item is taking up.

I like this tool, it’s simple, and focuses on one thing, controlling what starts automatically on your pc. Easy to use, and it’s free!